Can anyone recommend an alternative to the built-in Music app? I’d gladly pay for something less idiosyncratic, less buggy and with a better designed user interface. To be honest, iTunes was miles better but Apple have continued to ‘break’ it almost as though someone in Apple has a personal grudge against people who build music collections and use them. Please don’t suggest submitting a bug report to Apple – life’s too short to detail all the problems I have with th
e app. If they want to pay me as a design consultant, that’s fine, but I suspect they wouldn’t
You didn’t mention if you were interested in streaming music or managing your own collection of purchased/ripped music.
Someone on another forum mentioned Doppler for Mac and iPhone. I haven’t tried it, but it looks like it could be interesting for people who just want to listen to music they already own.
I strongly dislike the mess that Apple Music has become, especially for music that is owned instead of streamed. Beyond that, the interface quirks and bugs can be maddening.
Note, however, that if you have any DRM-wrapped songs (e.g., iTunes purchases from before they started selling in the “iTunes+” format), you’ll need a player that can decrypt FairPlay. I don’t know of any third-party player apps that can do this.
But if this isn’t a concern, then there should be a lot options. Some web searches will help you find them, including articles with recommendations. Here’s one such search.
I’d also love to hear what’s working well for others, for playing owned local files (DRM-free) specifically. Apple Music is so clunky and buggy for this simple use case, and I’m done fighting with it.
I’ll second that.
I own all my tracks so I welcome anything to get me out of Music since it has become a buggy/unusable front for hawking Music+ subscriptions.
My priorities for its replacement would be:
no subscription, 1-time cost is fine though
runs on both macOS and iOS and can sync between the two (preferably via wifi)
supports creating/manipulating/using playlists like Music
I went to the Cs Music Pro page in the App Store, where I see that the developer left a note basically apologizing for adding iOS 26 and Liquid Glass “features” to the app. I can appreciate why he felt the need to apologize, since presumably a fair percentage of his users naturally want a less “modern Appled” user experience (UX).
I don’t have a problem with the developer’s choice to bend to Apple pressure, but I had to laugh at the App Store’s UX. I wanted to copy part of his comment to quote for this post, but the App Store app wouldn’t let me do it. When I opened the page in a web browser, copying text was disabled there, too. I had forgotten that Apple long ago decided to break the most basic web functionality in its store.
I decided to copy the text by opening up the page source, but by then I was annoyed enough with Apple that I decided it wasn’t worth the time.
In any event, I bought the app. I want to do what little I can to encourage alternatives.
Screenshot → Open in Preview → Copy text from the picture
“Visual updates for iOS 26 and Liquid Glass.
I understand that adopting these visual updates for some users. However, the guiding principle for Cs is to preserve the tabbed Music.app UX in a format that is native with modern iOS. A modern interface design in screenshots also obviously makes a difference to App Store performance. I have tried to minimize the visual changes as much as possible. I hope users that may be disappointed by this change understand, and hopefully refrain from voicing their frustration in 1-star reviews.
And for everyone else who are enjoying Cs, please consider leaving a 5-star review and/or referring the app to a friend! It makes a big difference. Thank you!”
CS Music Pro appears to be iPhone/iPad only; not sure which OS @cliffmcknight is searching for, I assumed Mac.
I’m amazed at the abundance of options in the links in this thread, and a bit of additional searching. I need to research more while casually searching for a (or more) player(s) that will see audio files on my Mac Mini over home network from OSes and Linux and offer some basic organizing, playlists etc. Don’t do any streaming and don’t need any automated playlists.
Not sure what % of my collection is from purchased CDs and what is .m4p bought on iTunes but it sounds like I’ll need an Apple product to play the latter.
Thanks @cliffmcknight for starting this informative Topic!
For my audiophile stuff, I have a BlueSound Vault and associated speakers. My beef is purely about Music’s user interface and the way it has been ‘fixed’ over the years.
You’re welcome! My real problem is that any alternative needs to interface to MegaSeg. Since 2008 I’ve been publishing a weekly music podcast which relies heavily on that app. It reads the Music database, imports any new additions to Music and lets me build a playlist. The developers seem to have tied it to (originally iTunes and then) Music. Given its complexity, I imagine they have to draw a line somewhere …
My understanding is that’s only true for the older pre-2009 Apple DRM.
The more modern iTunes Plus format digitally signs the file to your Apple account, but there is no DRM on it preventing any player from playing it.
The latter (at least the non-lossless) shows up as .m4a and kind says “Purchased AAC audio file”. Music.app will also show the Apple ID of the purchaser in its Info > File section. The former, however, uses .m4p and says something like “Protected AAC audio file” for kind. Music.app will also reveal the purchaser’s Apple ID.
I haven’t investigated that far yet, but they do say that they are “happy to answer any questions about Doppler. Send us an email: help@brushedtype.co.”
As @Simon nicely described, you only need the iTunes/Music apps to play old Apple DRM files. However, you generally can replace the DRM files with DRM-free versions.
The general workflow if you subscribe to iTunes Match or Apple Music is to sign into Apple iTunes/Music using the Apple ID/Account that was used to make the original purchase and verify that the purchase is still available. You may need to check for hidden music. MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF THE DRM file on your Mac, then delete the file from your Music Library, making sure that you also delete the original file on your computer. Then, go to your purchases in iTunes/Music, find the song you deleted from your library, and then redownload it. The result should be a 256 kbps, DRM-free version of the song.
There are some relatively rare edge cases where only 128 kbps versions are available, only DRM versions are available, or a song is not available at all. These edge cases generally are due to old licensing agreements with particular artists/publishers or regional issues.
This hasn’t been my experience. Although it’s been a long time, the last time I tried this, it downloaded a fresh DRM-wrapped copy of the song.
It was necessary to pay for an “iTunes+” upgrade to get a non-DRM version of the song. And not all songs were available to upgrade.
The only reliable way I know of is the CD loophole. Make playlists with your DRM-wrapped songs. Then burn audio CDs (you, of course, need a CD burner for this). Then you can rip the tracks back. This works. The downside is that it is slow, and you are re-compressing the audio (creating losses) if you don’t rip the tracks using a lossless format.
There are software tools for stripping FairPlay, but they may not work reliably.
